Before finding fame as television’s grittiest survivalist, Bear Grylls experienced a terrifying near-miss. This was 1996, when Grylls was 21 and serving in the SAS. He was skydiving in Zambia, and excited to take part in what was meant to be a routine parachute jump. But nothing about what happened next was standard. After his chute failed to open properly, Grylls continued hurtling towards the ground at breakneck speed, tumbling more than 16,000ft in total. Then everything went dark. When Grylls woke up in hospital, he learnt he’d broken three vertebrae, and that he might never be able to walk again.
“That accident was definitely a dark, difficult time for me at a young age,” the 49-year-old Grylls tells me today. “Things that I had taken for granted, like my health, my job and my skills, were suddenly gone. I had a major reset in my life the way you hope is never going to happen.”
